Friends (7 page)

Nothing comes. I wait. Nothing. No decision and nothing about the decision. I return to page 221 an hour later. Nothing comes. He doesn't move or say anything. He stays on the bridge. In the same spot, without a thought, gesture or word. Without doing anything, and everything around him stays the same too. I try to make something come to him or happen to him, so the novel could continue till the time he does make the decision, but nothing happens or comes. I return to page 221 a few hours later and do everything I can to make the decision come, to make anything happen around him or anything come, but nothing does. Then the next hour and then the next day. Each day after that, and many times a day some days, for two more weeks. Nothing.
go to a bridge with the 220 pages, the same bridge I left him on, in the same city I've lived in for years and walked him through these last twenty to twenty-one months and throw the whole thing into the river. Most of the pages just sink. A couple of dozen or so float for a while downstream and sink. A few pages keep floating downstream till I can't see them. Four of the pages I threw float in the air till they land on the shore. One rolls into the river and sinks but the other three remain. No real problem. Nobody would know, if he found those pages, where they came from and probably not what they mean. Wouldn't really matter to me if anyone did. Wouldn't matter at all, in fact, not at all, and I mean that. I go home and sit down to start another novel, but with a new character for me. I'll make him older, of a different nationality, and with a wife. I'll put him in the country, since I've never written anything but about city life. I'll call him Bill or Phil or Ed, three names I've never used before, “p. 1” I write on the top left-hand corner of the page. Maybe that's as far as I'll get. I don't know, but I do care. “Bill walked into his house.” So, there's more. I sit for hours and try to think of something to follow that sentence, but nothing comes that makes any sense. I get up and tell myself to come back to it later today.

Training to Magna

It's been a long tough week of work and other things and for the train ride to New York I just want to be alone and rest. I walk the half mile from my apartment to the Baltimore station, buy my ticket and in the waiting room see every seat but one is filled. If I sit in it I'm almost sure someone on either side will start talking to me—it usually happens—so maybe I should just stand. But the train from Washington's been delayed by twenty minutes, the stationmaster says over the p.a. system, so I take the seat, put my overnight bag between my feet, my briefcase on my lap, close my eyes and think Just rest.

“When they say twenty minutes, do they mean thirty or even forty minutes?” the woman on my right side says.

“Talking to me, ma'am?”

“Yes, sorry, did I wake you? This is my first train trip, other than for that little subway under the Capitol in Washington, so I don't know if that announcement was only some delaying tactic for not telling us the train's going to be an hour late, possibly two.”

“When they say twenty it usually means twenty and sometimes it means fifteen.”

“You've ridden the trains from here a lot?”

“Every Thursday around this time,” I say, “or really about three out of four weeks.”

“You work in Baltimore and both travel that much?”

“I travel for personal reasons—to see a friend in New
York—but teach here.”

“Community College?” the man on the other side of me says. “That's where my wife went nights.”

“University of Maryland Baltimore County my school's called.”

“Baltimore?” he says. “Oh yeah, I know the one. Way out in the sticks.”

“Sort of, that's right.”

“What do you think?” she says to him. “Our train from Washington will be an hour late, or only twenty minutes as the announcer and this man says?”

“Got me. I'm just stopping here. Seemed a good place to come in out of the rain.”

“It's stopped,” I say.

“Has? Well it had to one day, but I'll just sit a while more. For now I've no real place to go.”

“When does the train reach Trenton?” she asks me.

“I'm not sure.”

“Because you said you rode it so much, I thought—”

“This is The Montrealer. It's a slower train than I usually take.”

“Which one's that?”

“The 5:l5—I don't know the name. Excuse me. I just remembered something.”

I go downstairs to the platform. There are two benches there. A man's sitting on the one nearest the stairs, so I go to the other. It's empty and I sit. I close my eyes.

“Mind if I sit here?” a man says.

“No no, of course.” I look at my watch. I was asleep for two minutes.

“Your bags. I don't mean to, but if it's no problem?”

“Oh sorry, I wasn't thinking.” I put the overnight bag on the ground and the briefcase on top of it.

“How far you going?”

“New York.”

“Same here. I always wanted to catch the evening Mon-trealer. I like the club car idea. I don't like buying a split of wine and then sitting with it in my seat. I like the tables and chairs and, you know, to spread out a bag of peanuts or cards, even.”

“It's much better,” I say, “though there's usually too much smoke in there for me.”

“Sure, I can see it if you don't smoke. You go up often?”

“Every now and then.”

“I go twice a week. That's back and forth, back and forth two times. It gets boring but it's my work, and I wouldn't live there. Only way to liven the trip up is by taking the plane occasionally or getting different kinds of trains. The evening Montrealer is one I never got. The one in the morning from New York I've done a couple-dozen times, but it rarely carries the club car, don't ask me why, but if it does it's usually locked and they're only hauling it to Washington for this or some overnight Southern run. Besides, who wants wine at nine or ten in the morning—even eleven.”

“You could have coffee. Or English muffins.”

“You ever eat their English muffins, though the coffee's not bad.”

“No, it isn't.”

“It's not freeze-dried or instant at least. They make it in the pot.”

Yes, I've seen.”

“You work here but also have business in New York?” Tve a friend there, so occasionally I go for a long weekend.”

“I'm out in Towson.”

“That so?”

“Work there but live in Lutherville. Electronics. An Engineer, but now mostly supervision of sales. The Murke-Mirablia
Company.”

“I don't know of it.”

“One of Baltimore's largest employers. You'll see one of our warehouses on the way out.”

The stationmaster announces our train. That means it'll be here in seven or eight minutes. “Excuse me,” I say, and I get up, stretch, walk around the platform keeping my eyes on my briefcase and bag. People are coming downstairs, fanning out along the platform, a few heading with heavier luggage to the front where the sleeping cars will stop.

My feet hurt and I almost feel too tired to stand. So much preparing for classes this week, papers to read and grade, talking, talking in class and an inordinate amount of photocopying to do and departmental paperwork. And student readings. Two this week, and one visiting poet I had to meet at the airport, take to dinner, give the introduction for at her reading, go out for beers with after with some of the students, see her back to her hotel. And the old woman in my building. Three days in a row attending to this for her, that. Her lights blew because she overloaded one outlet. Next day she walked into my apartment two flights above hers. “Where am I?” she said. “I think I'm lost.” That night she screamed up the stairs for help. I went down to her with the second-floor tenant, saw she was sick and called an ambulance and she said “One of you come with me to the hospital. They'll kill me if you don't,” and I went with her, filled out her forms and helped take her to her room. Then called the landlord and said “Don't you know if she has somebody?” and he said “You don't think I want her out also, but so long as she doesn't want to she doesn't have to go to a home,” and next day calling the twenty people with her last name in the phonebook.

I go back to the bench. “Almost here,” the man says. “You can see the locomotive's light on the rails. Another reason I
prefer The Montrealer is it's much roomier inside. And window curtains. You laugh, but if you want to sleep all you have to do is draw the curtain, put your legs up on the leg rest and conk out. In the morning the curtains are only useful against the sun if you sit on the left side of the train going south. Which side would that be? I should know. I'm the engineer. The left side would be, well—heading south—let's see. My left hand. I'm going south.” He holds out his left hand, faces the direction the train's coming from. “South,” he says. “I'm going south. It would have to be east, of course, the left side, wouldn't it?”

“I think so.”

“I don't know why it's suddenly so confusing. But we'll say east. I must have a block about it. It has to be east, that's right. All that water from the Susquehanna and Chesapeake we pass pouring into the inlet. The tankers docked in Wilmington. And God help me, the sun rises there also. So the curtains are only useful on the east side in the morning, but I usually sit—”

“There's the train.”

“Great,” and he picks up his valise. I hold my bag and briefcase. The train stops. Lots of people are around us now. We stand to the side of the door as the conductor and passengers come out.

“Which one's the nonsmoking?” I ask the conductor.

“Rear car and one to your left.”

I go to the door on my left. The man's right behind me. I go in and he says “I smoke, but don't have to—I've in fact been warned not to, so if you want to continue our conversation?”

“I have to go much farther—something about the backs of trains.”

“You can't go too much farther and you're not that far back. Next one's probably a smoking car and then the club
car and after that the dining car they won't let you into till about eight.”

“I'll try. Nice talking to you.” I walk through the car, turn around at the end of it and see him putting his valise on the luggage rack. He sees me and points to the seats under the rack. I shake my head, point to the next car and tap the door-opening device.

I don't want to sit in the smoking car so I go into the club car. There don't seem to be too many smokers at the tables. I get a beer from the service bar, sit at an empty table, give the trainman my ticket and get back a seat check.

“Mr. Taub,” a young man says. I look up. I don't recognize him. Dark sunglasses, bangs almost over his eyes.

“Ed Shekian. I was in Ida's class last term.”

“Ida?” I'm sitting and he's standing.

“Ida Rulowitz. She invited you to speak to us because you're the expert in I don't know what. Robert Frost, I think.”

“Wallace Stevens?”

“That's right, Stevens, Pound and Eliot. You said you knew more about Stevens' work than Pound or Eliot, but that you maybe knew enough of their work for our class. It was an introduction to contemporary lit. Well, I saw you running up the aisle past me before and I thought ‘Whew, Mr. Taub, there he goes, I got to get him,' so I just dumped my stuff on a seat and ran after you. You remember Ida. How is she, you know?”

“Oh sure, Ida. She had an awful accident.”

“A woman on a motorcycle with about ten hours experience on it and on a major highway and without a crash helmet no less. That is just stupid, as smart a teacher and nice a person as she is.”

“Yeah, god, awful. Someone told me about her only last week. I didn't know. The school's so big. She was supposed
to be getting out of intensive care this week, this person said.”

“I knew that. I thought you might've known more. I wanted to visit her but they said not yet. Her boyfriend did. Look, excuse me for presenting this to you like this, but remember you said you'd do a radio interview for us?”

“For you? Did I? In what way?”

“For the campus radio station. You see, this year I've even a bigger position than I had last year. Not only chief engineer but the program coordinator too, and I'm trying to boost the programs on literary content a notch. You said, when a few of us talked to you after class, that you'd let yourself be interviewedin a Q and A session and maybe then would read some contemporary poems you like. Would you still be interested?”

“I don't know. I don't like to be on programs or even panels. I'm not asked that much, granted, but the microphone and I aren't great friends.”

“Oh, I've seen you introduce poets here. You do a terrific job. And we loved you in Ida's class. Most of us thought that could've been the best one all semester.”

“I still don't know. Listen, why don't you sit? You want a beer? I'm having one.”

“Sure, why not, this is great. I love meeting teachers like you who are famous on their own and also are great teachers and just talking with them casually like this. I'll be right back.”

“You have enough money?”

“Why wouldn't I? You mean for the beer?”

“Since I invited you, and I make more than enough, which partly comes from your tuition. And you must be paying—are you an out-of-town student?”

“From Staten Island. It costs a fortune, but I help out with three thousand of it. My father said—well it wasn't
even that. I just think it's what I should do, contribute to my education monetarily.”

“Three thousand's a lot though.”

“I work as a mason in the summer. Not a full mason but a step above apprentice. The mason I work under—”

“Why don't you get your beer?”

“Right. Your neck must be hurting, looking at me turned around.”